The “God of Manga” is an incredibly prestigious moniker for a person like Osamu Tezuka, whose impact continues to influence the anime and manga industry today. He’s worked on a variety of manga series like Astro Boy, Dororo, Black Jack, Phoenix, Kimba the White Lion, Princess Knight, and numerous other titles that have reflected a variety of styles and shonen, shojo, seinen, and gekiga sensibilities.
Today, Tezuka’s name may not be as notable to younger anime fans in 2026. In a modern sense, he’s often been compared to Walt Disney for having a similar grand influence on the comics and animation industry of their respective countries. However, filmmaker Jason Andrew Cohn believes there’s a lot more to understanding Tezuka’s legacy than we might think.
Anime Trending had a chance to interview Cohn, via email, to discuss his upcoming feature-length documentary project TEZUKA! God of Manga, why he turned to Kickstarter to fund it, and how his conversations with people who knew Tezuka informed his perspective on the person himself.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
There have been many written works and online videos discussing Tezuka’s career. Why were you interested in taking on and directing a feature-length documentary project about him?
Jason Andrew Cohn: The thing about Tezuka is that he was that rare artist who was also a transcendent cultural figure — someone whose influence extends way beyond the popularity of the work he produced. He gave birth to these culturally powerful industries (manga and anime) and made an enormous impact on all the artists who followed him and on how the world thinks about Japan. My background is basically in history, so those are the kinds of things I look for when I take on a documentary project. There have to be layers of meaning to the work and how the work intersects with broader society for it to hold my interest.
Beyond that, there’s something mysterious in his personality that I’ve always found compelling. There’s something hidden behind the wry smile and the glasses and beret. It comes out in really interesting ways in his work [and] I want to explore that.
How did you first discover Tezuka’s manga? What were some of his titles that made an impression or became your favorites?
Jason Andrew Cohn: I started reading his manga in Japanese when I was living in Sapporo and studying the language. Manga was a really good way to learn vocabulary! The first story I read was called Fushigi na Shōnen and it was about a kid named Saburo who could magically stop time, literally by yelling, “Time, stop!” And then he’d solve crimes and fix people’s problems because he could run around and do stuff while everyone else was frozen in time. It was cute but not very serious, so I went looking for something more age appropriate because I was in my 20s.
I found a really long seinen manga called Gringo, which is about a Japanese businessman in South America who gets caught up in these complicated corporate scandals. It was a really interesting reflection of 1980s internationalizing Japan. The thing I remember taking away from that was how completely different the two stories were. One was a silly episodic adventure for boys and the other was this long, sophisticated serial for adults with really mature themes.
Neither of those would probably count among his most popular and successful titles, but if you take them as bookends they start to give you a sense of just how prolific and eclectic his career was. So that made a big impression on me.
But if you want to know which books I’d recommend as introductions, I’d probably go with something more popular like his Buddha series or Black Jack. Those are both really fun to read but also reflect the philosophical depth that he was able to smuggle into entertaining storylines.
What have you learned about Tezuka, both as a person and a historical icon, through the interviews you’ve done so far? Have they changed or shifted your initial impressions of your first thoughts of him?
Jason Andrew Cohn: He emerges as a very complex character, with a suite of inter-connected motivations. On the one hand, he had these very high-minded impulses. He really saw manga as a universal language and as a way of communicating universal ideas about the need to achieve peace, treat all life with respect, and preserve the environment. He also was obsessively competitive and concerned with his place in the pecking order of Japanese manga and anime. So the confluence of those things drove what I’d call a fairly compulsive personality. He worked himself sick for much of his life and probably died a lot younger than he needed to, which is tragic.
I’m also really interested in pursuing the sort of dark recesses of his personality. You know, when he started writing for more mature audiences in the 1960s and 1970s he explored some pretty nihilistic territory. Whether the themes were political or sexual or anything else, a lot of it was fairly apocalyptic. The historian and writer Ada Palmer talks a lot about how Tezuka frequently returned to the theme of genocide in his work. And his treatment of sexual issues could be quite transgressive, especially considering he was someone who was famous for kids manga and television cartoons. I’m very curious about how much of that darkness was responding to what he thought the market was asking for, or whether it was coming more from his own simmering angst and neuroses.
Why was Kickstarter the best platform to fund this documentary project? Were there any other funding methods you and the producers considered?
Jason Andrew Cohn: We actually applied for and won a $600,000 federal grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2024. It’s a very prestigious and competitive grant and we had to work very hard to get it. But, then you may remember hearing about how the Trump administration created DOGE and allowed Elon Musk to defund anything in the government he didn’t care for? Along with dozens of other filmmakers, we lost our entire grant. It was devastating.
Fortunately for us, we had an angel: our executive producer Glen S. Fukushima, who is a prominent Japanese-American businessman with a longstanding interest in U.S.-Japan relations, stepped in with stop-gap funding so we were able to continue production. That allowed us to fly to Tokyo and film interviews with legends like Katsuhiro Otomo, Yoshiyuki Tomino, Riyoko Ikeda, Go Nagai, Rintaro, Masao Maruyama and Naoki Urasawa.
We still have a long way to go to raise the funds we need to make this film, so Kickstarter is really the best option. Plus, it helps us connect with fellow fans and build an audience for the documentary even while we’re still in production. So even if we hadn’t lost all that money in the DOGE debacle, we probably would have done a Kickstarter campaign. It’s a lot of work but it’s worth it just for building the community around the project.
You’ll have interviews with comic artists Paul Pope and Ron Wimberley once the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign progresses. Are there any other interviewees you have planned to talk to that you haven’t announced yet? Will you also be speaking with his son, Macoto Tezka?
Jason Andrew Cohn: Yes, we definitely plan to interview Macoto. He’s been super helpful to us in getting the film this far. And he has a lot to say about his father. I’m curious to hear how present (or absent) his dad was in his life, given what we know about his work hours. Tezuka famously rarely slept more than four hours a night. I imagine it’s hard to be the child of someone like that.
We also want to spend time with young anime artists to talk about some of the techniques they developed at Mushi Pro in the 1960s for producing animation so cheaply. It’s an opportunity to discuss what some people call “Tezuka’s Curse,” which is the idea that the low wages and difficult work conditions endemic in anime today were the consequence of the super-low price Tezuka initially charged Fuji TV for each episode of Astro Boy. I’m not sure I buy that theory, but I’d love to hear their take on it.
Osamu Tezuka passed away at a time when the anime industry was about to enter a different era. How do you think he would react to seeing the worldwide popularity of anime and manga in 2026?
Jason Andrew Cohn: Nobody, at the time Tezuka was alive, was anywhere near as focused as he was on achieving international audiences for Japanese popular culture. Obviously, Astro Boy was the first to cross over in 1963 and made everything else possible. So I think he’d be thrilled to see Japan competing pound-for-pound with Hollywood around the world. And I suspect he’d be very jealous that Western audiences today are familiar with a bunch of Japanese anime artists, and by and large, he’s not really one of them!
If you had a chance to speak with Tezuka himself over a private dinner between the two of you, what questions would you ask and what would you like to talk about with him?
Jason Andrew Cohn: One of the things that made Tezuka so unusual is that he was a genuine intellectual with a super-wide range of interests. A lot of people know he was a licensed medical doctor with a very acute scientific mind. He was also a virtuoso classical piano player, a theater actor, and director. He was extraordinarily well-read in world literature and was a huge film buff.
Beyond all that, he had really eclectic interests in religious and philosophical ideas. So I don’t think I’d try to pin him down about comics or animation. I’d just want to have a freewheeling conversation with him about all the things he loved. I figure we could at least bond about classic movies from the 1940s [to] 1970s. That’s my jam!
What do you hope people take away from your documentary and the people you’ve spoken to once the film is complete?
Jason Andrew Cohn: I don’t think Tezuka is nearly as famous with today’s fanbase as he ought to be, so that’s one thing that’s important to me. I want Tezuka to be one of the first names people conjure up when they think about pioneers of comics and animation. There shouldn’t even be a hesitation to put him in the same conversation as Disney and [Hayao] Miyazaki, for example.
Beyond that, I want people to walk away with the picture of a very complex and multi-faceted artistic genius who chose these occasionally maligned artforms as his canvas. For people who don’t think much of comics and animation, I want them to have second thoughts about why they think these are necessarily less interesting than film and literature.
The Kickstarter campaign page for TEZUKA! God of Manga has now been launched, as of October 14, 2026.
